Consultant-speak at its best. What is missing in the article is a thread of clarity and simplicity in showing how Lean and Innovation can and does co-exist. What will help is to clearly define "Innovation". At bottom, innovation is finding a solution to a problem. Even better, finding the simplest, cheapest, most effective and practical solution to a problem.

I think Lean is well suited to support innovation because its bias is towards finding elegant, cost-effective, and effective countermeasures to root causes. "Innovation" as described in superficially in this article, seems to point to shiny bright objects that may or may not actually solve a human problem.

Brad -- your analysis is pretty shallow. There is a long history of Data versus Fact -- this, really, is a question about epistemology, reaching back to Socrates.

More recently, however, Taiichi Ohno, the creator of the Toyota Production System adds a twist: being at the place of where value is added (genchi genbutsu and gemba) is experiencing the facts of the situation. Data, on the other hand, is a step removed from facts.

Taiichi strongly advocated "being at the place", not in some boardroom discussing charts and graphs, when being at the production floor with the people, machines, and processes -- that is where the real story is.